Tag Archives: problem solving

I was facilitating a group of senior leaders who were tasked with leading the innovation effort in their respective organization and started the facilitation with the simple yet profound question – “How do you define innovation?” The best answer I’ve so far received to this question is the following: “Innovation is applied problem solving leading to generation of value.” The ...

The leaders of a 25,000-person U.S. government organization had a serious problem. They were stuck with outdated hardware and software, sometimes dating back to the eighties. Their workforce did not seem capable of adapting, and frustrated younger employees were leaving for more promising opportunities. Their customers and partners were asking for increasingly complicated support using newer technologies that could not ...

The ability to solve problems quickly is now crucial to the successful running of any business. There are more obstacles to be overcome and more testing situations to navigate than ever before. The Internet Age has brought forth so many new opportunities, but it has also introduced layers of constantly shifting complexity that present previously unseen difficulties. But, even more ...

If you boil down the function of Human Relations to logical extremes, you end up with polar opposites. On one hand, you have the traditional view of HR: a place to fill out all of your essential employee paperwork, ask questions about benefits, send out messages about birthdays, and a place to be heard if you have an issue with ...

“‘Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” John Swigert’s famous words, delivered in a voice as calm and clear as the mountain air in his native Denver, Colorado. But to the Apollo 13 mission controllers thousands of miles below in Texas, this fired the starting gun in a race against time. At 3:08 a.m. UTC on April 14, 1970, an explosion in ...

Testing the traction We all try to avoid the bias of the ‘Law of the Instrument’— whereby we walk around with our hammer and see everything as a nail — but when you keep seeing a method really help people think differently, it’s hard not to want to share the hammer around… I gave a presentation to some med. students ...

According to legend, Henry Ford scoffed at market research and what we now call Consumer Insights, proclaiming, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” While there is a certain degree of wisdom in this statement, it has been misquoted to justify bad, hubris-inspired product failures by too many corporate egos. Yes, to Ford’s ...

Every entrepreneur dreams of having that single moment of epiphany where everything falls into place. Many search for their entire careers for that one big idea that will make the difference between incredible success and frustrating mediocrity. Few ever find it and many that do end up crashing and burning along the way. The truth is that innovation is never ...

The 12 steps to biomedical innovation starts with being a problem seeker, not a problem solver. Eventually, to be successful, customer problems and solutions need to meld around a VAST business model i.e. one that is not just profitable, but that demonstrates: 1. Validity Regardless or which elements of your model you choose, they have to be valid. In other words, the dogs have to ...

Premise: DW Akademie recently reported that Germany would like to experiment with making public transportation free in 5 of its cities to explore if this can help it meet the pollution norms of European Union. The question is if this is the approach that will produce the results that it is expecting to achieve. This in addition to the policy to ban ...